'Key & Peele': Funny isn't all black-and-white

Associated Press

Updated 4:04 pm, Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Photo: Comedy Central

Image 1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

As guys who both lay claim to biracial status, Keegan-Michael Key, left, and Jordan Peele from the sketch-comedy series "Key & Peele" share a state of informed in-betweenness about race and culture that is never mean.

As guys who both lay claim to biracial status, Keegan-Michael Key, left, and Jordan Peele from the sketch-comedy series "Key & Peele" share a state of informed in-betweenness about race and culture that is

As guys who both lay claim to biracial status (black fathers, white mothers), they share a state of informed in-betweenness that gives their comedy extra punch and extraordinary insight.

Race fuels much of "Key & Peele," their sketch-and-stand-up half-hour series airing at 9:30 p.m. Wednesdays on Comedy Central. Straddling the great divide between white and black, they deliver a special brand of laughs, along with the occasional epiphany.

"There's been a lot of racial comedy over the years," Peele says. "But being biracial, mixed individuals, we realized there's been nothing from our perspective."

Even so, their mission isn't social reform.

"We're not trying to lead anybody toward any specific conclusion," Peele says, "except that, ultimately, race is an absurd thing."

"It always boomerangs back to culture," Key adds.

They are happy to show how.

The comedy of Key and Peele is clever, keenly observed and fearless. But never mean.

Consider their sketch set in the antebellum South. They play slaves who, placed on the auction block, grow increasingly indignant that no one is bidding on them while all the other slaves are snapped up.

Most Popular

Then there's the sketch set in Germany in 1942, as a Nazi colonel looking for escaped Negroes finds Key and Peele hiding out - in white-face. With their nervous denials and foolish-looking disguise, they manage to convince their pursuer that they're not one of them.

Peele displays TV's best impersonation of Barack Obama in several sketches in which the unflappable president is joined by Luther, his "anger translator" who channels, unfiltered, what Obama is really thinking.

For instance, after Obama calmly tells viewers that "Gov. Romney and I have different ideas on how to best help the American people," Luther (played by Key) screeches his unbridled version of the message: "I killed Osama bin Laden! And you strapped your dog to the top of your car!"

In person, Key and Peele are both affable, reflective chaps who genuinely seem to get a kick out of each other.

Key, the tall, hyper and bald partner, is 41 and grew up in Detroit. Peele, husky and more laid-back, is 33 and hails from New York.

They met a decade ago in Chicago, where Key was performing in a Second City improv troupe and Peele, then in the Amsterdam-based Boom Chicago comedy group, was visiting as part of a cast swap between Boom and Second City.

Needless to say, they found they had much in common.

Both soon found their way to Los Angeles, where they spent several years in the ensemble of Fox's "Mad TV."

Then, earlier this year, they unveiled the first season of "Key & Peele," an ideal showcase for them to find the funny in issues that may or may not address race explicitly but often use race as a way to score laughs.

In one sketch, Key and Peele play a pair of natty businessmen grabbing lunch at a soul-food diner. As they place their orders, they slip into a duel of "competing blackness" to see who can think of the most "authentic" soul-food cuisine. The grand winner is Key's character, who orders up "a platter of stork ankles, an old cellar door, a possum spine and a human foot." With gravy.

A routine like that makes a telling comment on how people feel a need to claim, defend or reassert membership in one group or another. And this holds true especially when someone doesn't naturally identify with any group.

Sometimes the urge for membership can lead a person astray. In one sketch, Key plays a bald prison inmate who seeks kinship with a group of likewise bald prisoners. But rather than accept him, they keep beating him up. They're shaved-head white supremacists.

"You can talk about a comfortable WASP experience or a comfortable blackness," Key says matter-of-factly, "but we've never occupied either of those spaces."